Technical drawings are generally used as a point of departure for the automation of plants or machines today. The drawings are designed from the perspective of plant engineering, mechanical engineering, or process engineering. When it is necessary to develop an automation solution, the requirements and specifications which are associated with the system are usually formulated on the basis of these drawings. Controllers for emergency cut-off circuits, the formation of component groups belonging to a controller, or a network topology, for example, are developed on the basis of corresponding drawings. In this context, the development takes place by means of manual conversion from the drawing, without specific drawing elements being associated with semantics which could be used automatically for the specification of an automation solution. The conversion is effected manually or verbally instead. In this context, relevant information which can be extracted from the drawing is often only partially transferred. Consequently, it is not currently possible to use the information from the technical drawings directly for the implementation of an automation solution.